The mid-summer telephone call to the Hyannis household of "Chuck" and Kelly King created considerable excitement. The caller was Jason Varitek, a catcher with the Hyannis Mets of the Cape Cod Baseball League the previous season. Varitek, a Georgia Tech star, had just turned down a contract signing with the Minnesota Twins (No. 1 draft choice) to remain in school. During her conversation with Varitek, Kelly King was asked if she thought the Mets were still interested in him. The King family was very much a part of the Cape League, and had hosted Varitek the previous summer. "Jason, are you crazy? Of course they would," she told him. Varitek came to the Red Sox from Seattle in '97.

The story is one of many entertaining accounts and descriptions of Cape Cod Baseball League life, its players, host families, scouts and fans that make the new book, Cape Crusaders, a breezy, easy read, and earns it a place on the shelf with other published works on the Cape League.

Author Mike Thomas, a sports editor of the Fall River Herald-News, brings to readers a pleasant mix of entertaining stories and hard data and statistics, the meat and potatoes for the diehard baseball fan.

Cape Crusaders opens with an introduction of some of "The Players" -- the heavy-hyped and the unknowns -- their backgrounds, lifestyles and idiosyncrasies. There was this pitcher named Barry Zito, a product of California, who played for Wareham and who did many funny things, according to his coach. Thomas tells how Zito's pitching coach, Joe Walsh of Harvard, remembered Zito "sitting in the dugout with orange (ear) plugs and pink sandals; he had a huge watch. I mean bigger than some of the clocks I've seen." Zito, if you must be informed, was the winner of the 2002 American Cy Young Award with the Oakland A's.

Cape fans particularly will enjoy Thomas' chapter devoted to their fellow Cape Codders -- the many host families who open their homes to strangers, the young, swinging college kids with dreams of glory and gold, and how the relationships between the two developed far beyond the baseball park. Then there are the descriptions of the off-the-field life, the part-time work jobs and humorous episodes of the Deep South and the Far West players attempting to unravel Yankeeland dialect and experiment with "steamahs." There was the Arizonian who simply couldn't figure out what he was supposed to do when told to "Go PAAHHK the CAAHH." And the Missourian who tried "steamahs" and complained about "ending with a ton of sand in my mouth."

The Cape Cod Baseball League rarely is talked about without reference to the aggressive scouting by the major leagues, and there are few amateur leagues across the continent that attract more scouts than the Cape organization. Thomas' sports coverage for the Herald-News has led to regular contact with the small army of scouts that works throughout New England. One of them, Lenny Merullo, played for Barnstable in 1935, and then went on to play for many years with the Chicago Cubs. "I've gotten to know many players who have travelled through Cape Cod and made it to the majors," he told Thomas. "They're like family to me."

To Thomas' credit, he does not ignore the most, arguably, popular years of the league, beginning after World War II. They were the Summertimes of the townies, the hometown players, many of them veterans, and of the inter-town rivalries through the '50s, none more intense than Cotuit vs. Mashpee. Inclusion of more names of the locals would have added spice to that section of an exciting era. The Cape Cod League lifts the curtain on the new season June 16. Breezing through the breezy Cape Crusaders is suggested as a delightful way to prepare for the opening.